Q:
You've said you were inspired to write about sex trafficking after glimpsing a
young woman, the age of your daughter, getting into a hotel elevator in
Yerevan, Armenia. What was the writing process involved in humanizing and
fictionalizing this difficult issue?

A:
There were a couple of issues that were important to me as a novelist while I
was writing this book.

First
of all, I did not want the sex in the novel to be erotic or gratuitous. I
wanted it to be clear that this behavior is about violence and degradation and
enslavement.

Moreover,
I know a little violence goes a long way: I wanted to be sure that readers
would keep turning the pages.

So,
I often had my novel The Double Bind in mind. That book revolves around a
horrific sexual assault, but most readers stayed with it. And I believe
they stayed with it because there is respite from the violence. It’s
about other things: homelessness, photography, etc.

Consequently, The Guest Room is about a lot of things: a marriage in crisis, a man’s fall
from grace, what it means to be a parent.

Second,
I hope — again, like The Double Bind — there are characters my readers can
identify with and care about.

In
this case, that meant making sure that Alexandra and Kristin and Richard and
Melissa all have rich, internal lives and backstories.

In
the end, I feel The Guest Room is first and foremost a literary thriller.
But, of course, my hope also is that it will help raise awareness of these
issues.

Q:
The novel includes the viewpoints of several different characters, but only
Alexandra’s story is told in the first person. Why is that?

“Dad,”
she said, “take this as a compliment, because I mean it that way.But I think your sweet spot as a writer is
seriously messed up young women.”

She
was referring, of course, to that book’s narrator, Emily Shepard. But she was
also thinking of Connie Danforth in Midwives or Laurel Estabrook in The
Double Bind or Serafina Bettini in The Light in the Ruins.And she could have been speaking now about
Alexandra.

All
of those young women (and many others in my work), have deep emotional or
physical scars. But they are also survivors. They are strong and interesting
and courageous.

And
I view Alexandra the way I do all of them – and so I wanted her to have her own
voice.

But
I also wanted to juxtapose her voice with the perspective of the Americans. She
is presented, as you observed, in the first person.Richard and Kristin and Melissa and Philip
and Nicole are all presented in the third person. I hope that makes Alexandra’s
utter loneliness – her aloneness, to be precise – all the more apparent and
wrenching.

Q:
You focused on Armenia in your novel The Sandcastle Girls, and in The Guest
Room, one of the main characters is also Armenian. Why did you decide to set
some of this new book in Armenia?

A:
In some ways, the two novels are bookends – the past and the present.

The
Sandcastle Girls gives voice to the 1.5 million Armenians systematically
annihilated in the Armenian Genocide, and that is profoundly important to me as
a descendant of survivors.

At
the same time, however, I never want to lose sight of Armenia today, and the
amazing, beautiful, intelligent new generation growing up there. I want to give
voice to them, too.

Every
time I’m there, I am utterly dazzled by the young people. When I was in Yerevan
in September, I spoke at some of the universities, and the students’ enthusiasm
and drive humbled me.

But
the nation really needs those of us in the Diaspora to step up. The country is
trying to build a market economy while surrounded by closed borders and nations
that wish it did not exist; it is trying to build democracy after generations
of communism; and one of its largest cities, Gyumri, is still rebuilding from a
cataclysmic earthquake.

That
is all material for great drama and great fiction.I hope you see elements of all of it in The
Guest Room.

Q:
What are you working on now?

A:
Oh, these things tend to change a lot: the characters, the plot, the
themes.But I have been researching
parasomnias lately and studying some very specific kinds of sleepwalking.
Expect a literary thriller in 2017.

About Me

Author, THE PRESIDENT AND ME: GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE MAGIC HAT, new children's book (Schiffer, 2016). Co-author, with Marvin Kalb, of HAUNTING LEGACY: VIETNAM AND THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY FROM FORD TO OBAMA (Brookings Institution Press, 2011).